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Writer's pictureThe CLV Phoenix

The Mysterious Vanishing of Amelia Earhart

By Faith Daniels

 

Amelia Earhart was the very first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, obtaining her licence as a pilot in 1923 when it had only been given to 15 other women. She urged other women to become pilots just like her while also pushing her boundaries with the limited technology they had. Her final achievement was to complete a flight around the world.


Her plane lacked many communication aid to be able to fly safely to landing. On her final flight in 1937 at 8:43am she apparently encountered bad weather conditions when 

approaching Howland, and never landed.


Many theories have speculated about what actually happened that day, no one knows exactly where she crashed or how due to the bad quality of the communications given to the Coastguard who would help her land. There is one main theory that she became a castaway on Nikumaroro Island, others say she  landed on the island and was taken as a prisoner by authorities.  In the 40s, harvesters found bones on the island; they also found a shoe and a box that had contained a navigational device. The bones were taken to a local doctor but the objects that had been discovered disappeared. A file was also found in the 90s about a human skeleton being found on the island.


It turns out that evidence from the island was slowly being collected: a piece of a plane was found and did not match any planes from WWll and the bones were reexamined and it was said they were a woman’s bones who would've been around 5’7. Also, in 1937, a British expedition had taken a picture of an object sticking out of the coral reef and the US State Department confirmed that it was a piece of debris from Earhart’s plane. There have been lots of searches for Earhart over the year but not piece of concrete evidence has turned up.


However, as of January this year researchers claim to have found her crashed plane, the Electra, on the bottom of the ocean floor. Richard Gillespie who is the founder of The International Group for Historic Aircraft Discovery believes that the plane could not possibly be the Electra. He says the shape of the aircraft does not match the one Earhart had flown and it mainly looks like an American fighter jet.


Could this be the start of some answers about the disappearance of Amelia Earhart?


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